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"God forgives many
things, but God never forgives us the wrong we do to a child," Fiela Komoetie famously said
in Dalene Matthee's renowned Afrikaans book, Fiela se Kind.

These words kept coming back to me over the last two
weeks as I was watching the awful scenes of children of asylum seekers being
separated from their parents in America. During the years I worked for UNICEF I
met many children to whom the most horrific things had been done. I will never
be able to understand how adults can do so much harm and inflict so much pain to
vulnerable and innocent little beings.

We must never forget that children are totally
innocent in all the political games as well as the violent crimes and wars of
adults. They are not the ones who cause the life-threatening conditions that
make their parents flee in search of safety and peace. Nor are they the ones
who have any role to play in the narcissistic games of politicians. They were
brought into this world by adults who have a collective responsibility to love
and protect them. Yet, they always seem to bear the brunt of adult cruelty.

As I watched the images of officials tearing screaming
children away from their hysterical mothers, I wondered what was going on
inside those uniformed guards. I presume that many of them have children. Do
they not think about their own children when they take these traumatised
children away from their only source of security? How do they sleep at night,
having tucked in their own children? How do they answer when asked: "What
were you doing today?"

More importantly, how will they answer in future when
their children ask: "Where were you when all this was happening?"

This is of course not unique to recent events in
America. In all cases of severe human rights abuses these questions arise.
Generations of German children have asked these questions of their ancestors in
relation to Nazi Germany as have children in Rwanda, Bosnia and here in South
Africa.

I have always wondered how, for example, apartheid security
policemen did the most inhumane things to people and yet functioned normally
within society and their families. How did they torture, rape and kill people
during the day and at night made love to someone? How did they sit in church on
Sunday and prayed to a God that demands of them to love their neighbour like
themselves?

The answer of course lies in the fact that these men
(and sometimes women) do not see the people they abuse as their neighbour in
the biblical sense of the word. They see them as the "other"; an "other"
that threatens their precious existence and that they have to protect the "us"
from.

The moment the "otherness" is created it is
a very easy jump to a total dehumanisation of the "other". Backed up
by some ideological or religious narrative based on fear and hatred, these enforcers
can do so with very little or no regard for the pain they cause. As we have
seen recently in America they will justify it as a sacred duty to enforce the
law. Laws which were written by politicians who know very well that using fear is
the easiest way to win votes and power.

That is what made South Africa so different for the two
or more decades after 1994. We built a country on hope – not fear – in which
most of us embraced "usness" instead "otherness".

The danger is that we are fast moving into a phase
where "otherness" is again becoming part of our political narrative. Powerful
politicians are using the same type of race and ethnicity-based narratives that
were and are still being used the world over, to mobilise people and to put or
keep these politicians in power.

There is absolutely no question that we MUST correct
the injustices of the past, but we can't do that by using the same narratives
and/or ideology that caused those injustices. By referring to Indian people, coloured
people, African people and white people as uniform groups with specific
characteristics, beliefs and ideologies these politicians are again invoking the
concept of "otherness" on which apartheid and many other crimes against
humanity were built.

Of course, over the short term it will work for them. They
will get votes based on hatred, anger and fear. The problem is that this "us
vs them" strategy always ends up in big human tragedies.

We need to be very vigilant because it will creep up
on us. If there is something the Rwandan genocide must teach us, it is how the
language of hatred can gradually enter the political narrative. Not much
attention was paid to it at first, but it festered and grew and suddenly the
boil exploded and left around a million people dead in three months.

It is crucial that we expose and dismiss politicians
and community leaders the world over who use prejudice and hatred to feed their
hunger for power.

I still don't know what US first lady Melania Trump was trying to do
or say with the bizarre jacket she wore on her visit to the separated children.
But I do know that our answer to her and all politicians the world over should
be: "Yes, we DO care. We care about everyone and not just those who look
like us, speak like us or share a common history. The question is, why don't
you?"

- Melanie Verwoerd is a former ANC MP and South African Ambassador to Ireland.

Disclaimer: News24 encourages freedom of speech and the expression of diverse views. The views of columnists published on News24 are therefore their own and do not necessarily represent the views of News24.

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